Sunday, March 11, 2018

Happy end-of-winter, friends!Snow still coats the ground here in Minnesota, but we are casting our thoughts ahead to the coming weeks of spring. We've gone summer-clothes shopping. Twice. We've bought our season passes for the waterpark. We've loaded up on flipflops and sunscreen and allergy meds. We've roused ourself from languid hibernation and we're done with the white and brown and grey. Bring on the green of maple buds! The blue of the swimming pools! The gold of the summer sun!I am finishing up the Season 2 critters of Menagerie, which made me think of all the animal babies I've made and shared on this blog. Thought I'd do a roundup for your entertainment, to maybe inspire you to make some for your own in time for spring!I suspect that bunnies are the animal I've made most varieties of in recent years (we have Kate to thank for that!) so let's begin with those.

To hold the cards in place are evenly-spaced cardboard strips creating gutters on the central tower

and the floor of the carousel,

so all the cards are visually accessible at once.

This was such an enjoyable project - all three builds were, but this one especially. In addition to being an aesthetic display, it also behaved like a toy. And who doesn't love cardboard toys?

Let's deconstruct!

The moving mechanism first. This is the heart of the carousel. What we need is essentially a flat circular surface on which spheres can move as bearings.

Because the bearings move the carousel in a rotating circle, the bearings themselves need to remain in a ring. In order to keep the spheres from escaping from the ring, there need to be walls containing them.

But the walls must be low enough to expose the tops of the bearings to do their work - in this case, freely rotate a platform that will rest on top of them.

And this bearing casing needs to be high enough so that that rotating platform is adequately separated from the surface on which this mechanism rests. Here is the finished mechanism with an axle screw sticking out of its central hole. This axle will extend through the rotating platform above it, and provide a pivot about which the entire carousel spins.

Here is that platform - it's just a flat circle now. It's big next to the bearing case, isn't it?

If we connect it to the bearing case as is, we'll have a simple turntable. If you have kids, this is where they'll bring out their Polly Pockets and Playmobil and turn it into a communal merry-go-round.

But we need ours to be a card display, so let's keep working. I etched out a circle in the middle and drew equally-spaced radial lines outward. This circle will be the attachment point for the central tower, and those radial lines will be the gutters in which the cards will rest.

Now comes the most time-consuming part of this project - creating the gutters. On a second circle of cardboard, I drew the same little circle and radial lines and cut apart the segments. Then I shaved off a little of their sides, just enough that when they were glued on the platform,

they left narrow spaces between them.

Here is the finished gutter-ed surface.

Each of those gutters will hold one card.

Next, I ran a strip of cardboard around the circumference for trim

(and to create a barrier that will help keep the cards in).

Here is the finished platform attached to the bearing casing

and secured together with that axle screw.

Does it spin? Yes - here's a video!

The roof now - this is a large segment of a circle (I used three-quarters) with scalloped edges.

Corrugated cardboard doesn't roll well obliquely, so instead I folded it along eight edges to create a ribbed canopy rather than a cone.

This is the stem of the canopy. This will slide into the central tower. What's important here are these tabs - they will be attached to the underside of the roof with glue.

Here are some of the children helping with the painting. We used acrylic paint.

Back to the rotating platform now - this is the central tower. It's just a roll of cardboard glued into that etched circle where all the gutter-ed segments converge. It's just enough wider than the roof stem so that the two cylinders can snugly nest within each other without shifting.

But it is seamless i.e. you can't tell where the edges of the roll overlap to make the cylinder. See this technique in action in this post. This is important because corrugated cardboard is thick, and an overlapping seam would mess up the vertical ribs (see later photos) big time.

Here are the ribs - they're just strips of double-wall (see this post for different kinds of cardboard) corrugated cardboard

and they get glued all around the central tower. Notice how they meet the radial segments of the platform to create a continuous gutter from tower to platform.

All perfectly aligned. A little fiddly but not as difficult as it looks - because we'd cut identical segments and identical ribs, they all matched up without funky off-sizing.

Finished tower.

Here it is in action, holding cards.

In the landscape orientation, the cards extend all the way to the trim; in the portrait orientation, they don't, but the gutters keep them securely in place.

Here is the finished carousel, embellished and with the roof on.

In this shot, you can see a little of the roof stem just above the central tower.

As with the mailbox and house display boards, the embellishments were kept minimal, to allow the cards themselves to take center stage.

Hello and Welcome!

I am a gratefully unemployed mom of three girls, all of whom are growing up much too soon! I like piles of warm, fresh laundry, the smell of salt air near the beach where I used to live, making lists, anything round (like heads) and the quiet evenings sitting with the man of the house after the kids are in bed.

Copyright

You are welcome to link to this blog and to any post on this blog and use ONE or TWO photos for that purpose. Do not use photos of my children. You are welcome to pin images from my blog, if those photos do not have my children's faces in them. Please contact me if you want to use the text on, or more photos from, this blog. Do not post my tutorials on your sites. Do not translate tutorials from this blog into other languages on your site. The ideas and instructions in the tutorials are free - but please use them to only make stuff for yourself or for gifts and not to sell. Ta! For more information, this and this might be helpful.